Daily Inspiration Quote by Gerald Jampolsky

Creativity, Gerald Jampolsky implies, is less a lightning strike than a cleanup job: you don’t “get” originality so much as you remove the internal booby traps that keep you repeating yourself. Coming from a psychologist best known for therapeutic, spiritually inflected self-help, the line carries a clinical optimism with a quiet edge. The target isn’t censorship from the outside world; it’s the private rulebook most people treat as law: I’m not that kind of person, I’m too old, I’ll look stupid, I need permission, I must be good at it immediately.

The phrasing “self-imposed” is the tell. It reframes limitation as a psychological habit, not a fate. That’s therapeutic rhetoric doing what it does best: shifting the locus of control back to the individual, but without the harshness of pure bootstraps ideology. If the cage is self-built, it can be self-unbuilt. The gender-inclusive “him or herself” also situates it in a late-20th-century humanistic era that wanted liberation to be broadly available, not reserved for “geniuses.”

There’s a strategic provocation in “truly.” It polices the boundary between performative creativity (safe novelty that still protects the ego) and the riskier kind that requires tolerating embarrassment, failure, and ambiguity. The subtext: your biggest enemy is not lack of talent; it’s a nervous system trained to avoid discomfort. In a culture that sells creativity as identity and aesthetic, Jampolsky drags it back to process: freedom from your own prohibitions is the medium.